The subject matter disclosed herein relates to virtual networking, a configuration management server and a configuration management method.
In recent years, a complex virtual network for enabling to have various configurations has been constructed by using a combination of a plurality of virtualization technologies, in the technical field of computer networking.
The virtualization technology includes that of L2 (Layer 2) layer and of L3 (Layer 3) layer. The virtualization technology for L2 layer includes a virtual LAN (Local Area Network) technique, such as IEEE802.1Q VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network), and a virtual interface technique, such as VLAN-interface and a sub-interface. The virtualization technology of L3 layer also includes a virtual router technique, such as VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) and VR (Virtual Router).
In an office network, for example, a construction and configuration change for the virtual network have been easily realized by using the virtual LAN technique and virtual interface technique without the restriction stemming from the structure of physical network. In a datacenter network and career network, customer networks having various network configurations is virtually consolidated over a single physical network by combining the virtual router technique in addition to the above-described technique.
However, it has been difficult to maintain the correct information of a logical structure (logical topology) of the virtual network, as a result of realizing the complex configuration of virtual network. Physical devices configuring the network respectively function as if a plurality of virtual devices are present respectively inside the physical devices, and the virtual devices are coupled with each other by virtual links that are invisible to human eyes. As a result, the logical topology of the virtual network cannot be easily understood by only seeing a physical network. In contrast, even though one tries to determine the logical topology of the virtual network by checking information of configuration settings of the devices (config), the highly increased amount of items of setting information are set in the device group in the case of complex virtual network, therefore, it is difficult to acquire the entire logical topology of virtual network from the setting information of physical devices.
An existing method having been adopted for acquiring the logical topology of virtual network and its problem are described below. First, there is a method such that the logical topology of virtual network is written in a management document to hold it. A problem of this method is that information written in the management document is sometimes not coincident with settings actually set in the devices when one changes the device settings without updating the documents. Second, there is another method adopted to solve the above-described problem, that is, the setting information of the devices is manually inspected to draw a logical topology diagram. However, in the complex virtual network, the highly increase amount of items of setting information are set in the device as described above. Therefore, this method is not realistic since it possibly causes human error and takes a lot of time.
In order to solve the problem possessed in the existing method, an object is that the setting information of devices (config) is analyzed automatically to then create the logical topology information of virtual network automatically. The information of the logical topology of virtual network can be acquired if the config of device can be automatically analyzed, so that it can reduce the time to acquire the logical topology while reducing the human error.
In contrast to the above-described object, there is related art for automatically creating the logical topology information in the virtual network.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,593,352 discloses to automatically create a relation of information exchange among the virtual routers as the virtualization technology of L3. This technique is used for VPN (Virtual Private Network) service in MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) network. By using this technique, a path exchange relation among the respective virtual routers for a plurality of customer sites can be acquired from the setting information of VRF in MPLS routers.
JP-A-2009-194675, the counterpart US Publication of which is US 2009-0207756, discloses to automatically create topology information of VLAN in the virtualization technology of L2. This technique is that the setting information regarding the VLAN interface is used from the config information set in the devices in a network environment made up of switches and routers to create logical topology information configured by a plurality of VLANs.